[MD] DQ/sq as WATER/ice

[david buchanan]

David M said:
Well I see your [dmb's] criticism as misguided so I am trying to get you to see why it is wrong to raise it, this is why I mentioned Kant, obviously Kant sees there is a noumenal reality that transcends experience and is not a physicalist and neither am I. How exactly do you explain that the MOQ is not a solipsistic view without any transcendental element, impossible say Kant and Heidegger!


dmb says:

The criticism is misguided and wrong because Kant posits a noumenal reality? Actually, by taking up Kant's stance you have proven that my criticism is quite correct. Like I said, you're using the MOQ's jargon (static and dynamic) but you're still conceptualizing everything in terms of SOM. Your claims about the physical cosmos, about physical processes, and about Kant's noumenal realm of things-in-themselves are all conceptualized in terms of subject-object metaphysics. It's fine if you prefer Kant over Pirsig but, again, you're using Pirsig's central terms to assert the very position that Pirsig rejects. That's no good. It's confusing and just plain wrong.

"In a subject-object metaphysics, this experience is between a preexisting object and subject, but in the MOQ, there is no pre-existing subject or object. Experience and Dynamic Quality become synonymous. Change is probably the first concept emerging from this Dynamic experience. Time is a primitive intellectual index of this change. Substance was postulated by Aristotle as that which does not change. Scientific “matter” is derived from the concept of substance. Subjects and objects are intellectual terms referring to matter and nonmatter. So in the MOQ experience comes first, everything else comes later. This is pure empiricism, as opposed to scientific empiricism, which, with its pre-existing subjects and objects, is not really so pure.” [Pirsig, Lila's Child]


The MOQ avoids solipsism in all kinds of ways but my favorite is its view of thought and language as a common property. Pirsig corrects Descartes by making this point. 17th century French culture exists, therefore the thinks, therefore he exists. He talks about the felt harmony of seeing reasonable ideas from reasonable creatures like ourselves and the impossibility of stepping outside the mythos. It all adds up to a picture of thought and language as a shared space, as a public property. This is opposed to the "terrible secret loneliness" of the isolated individual, trapped in her own solipsistic world. And please notice what he says here about that "huge web of socially approved evaluations" wherein "key term 'evaluation,' i.e., quality decisions." 


"It is important for an understanding of the MOQ to see that although 'common sense' dictates that inorganic nature came first, actually 'common sense' which is a set of ideas, has to come first.  This 'common sense' is arrived at through a huge web of socially approved evaluations of various alternatives.  The key term here is "evaluation," i.e., quality decisions. The fundamental reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws approved of by common sense but the approval itself and the quality that leads to it." [LILA'S CHILD, Annotation 97]